Our Charlie Brown Christmas tree

I don't know how, but we ended up with a slight "Charlie Brown Christmas" tree this year.  We have an artificial tree that my Mother in law kindly donated to us over 10 years ago.  Each year more "needles" fall off the tree and this year I thought it would be bald by the time we got it decorated.  We decided to put the tree up this past weekend and Lucas was very excited to help me put the lights on the tree.  We were going to start with the white lights and then layer with the coloured string.  So we circled around the tree a bazillion times with the white lights and Lucas went to plug them in.  Nada.  We did not have sparkle.  We didn't even have a spark.  So we moved on to plan B, we would use only coloured lights this year.  So, I plugged in the coloured lights to make sure they worked (see, I can learn from past mistakes lol) and we started the dizzy dance again.  We took the white lights off and got the new string up and put all the decorations on and plugged it in.   Lucas said, mom the middle of the tree isn't lit up.  And he was right.  The complete middle of the tree was in blackness.  By this time I was ready to throw this tree out the window, it had lost so many needles from the first light removal I had no desire to do this again.  So I grabbed an extra light bulb and started checking them all.  Not fun, since all the baubles were on and they were dropping all over the place.  Lucas was quite impressed that they were at least bouncing when they hit the floor.  I explained that we had the best plastic Christmas baubles you could buy ;).  He thought that was awesome lol.  So I kept poking the tree and about 6 lights came back on when I moved the wires a certain way, but the rest were not lighting.  I figured it was just going be an endearing feature of the tree this year.  You almost can't tell, well, if you're not looking at the tree you can't.

Sophie and Lucas helped put all the decorations on, the home made ones get more plentiful each year.

As soon as we had finished the tree, our dog Riley had curled himself up underneath it.  Maybe it isn't so bad afterall.  Then again, he has pretty low standards ;)

Lucas put the star on the top of the tree like he always does, Sophie thought it was lots of fun to watch him way up in the air.  

Perhaps next year we will buy a big new tree that looks impressive in our new home's front window.  It would definitely have to be prelit. Then again, maybe our current version is more us.